


Voyage's End

by Mertiya



Series: Story Circle [24]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Ixalan predictions, M/M, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-29 22:14:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11450130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: It's been a week since Jace woke up without his memories on a plane he doesn't recognize.





	Voyage's End

**Author's Note:**

> AAAAAND we're back. I'm sure this is going to get jossed, but here's my annual "Ral shows up and rescues Jace from whichever backwater plane he's on this time." Honestly, this is partly for myself to get back into being able to write about these idiots, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

            Jace opened his mouth and swallowed seawater. Thrashing desperately, lungs protesting, he kicked his legs, trying to maneuver in what he hoped was an upward direction. He didn’t seem to be a good swimmer, _not that you would know_ , caroled a frantic, panicking part of his brain that was screaming about how he was going to die without ever knowing who he was or where he’d come from.

            The next moment, his head broke the water, and he gasped and retched desperately, trying to get oxygen into his burning lungs. There was a spar of wood floating near him, and he managed a few more feeble kicks to get close enough to slump over the top of it, shuddering and still coughing.

            Once the coughing spasm had subsided slightly, he looked around in some confusion. He was certain that there had been a raging storm not a moment before. Although, he thought bitterly, his mind, especially the memory components, had not been performing as well as he might have liked in recent times. He might even go so far as to say “within recent memory.” Still, there was something of a difference between having memories that only went back a week and the occasional flash or moment of sudden awareness that he’d somehow—missed a few seconds—and looking up to find bright sun shining down on him when moments before he’d been thrown from the deck of the ship that had initially rescued him by the raging wind and waves.

            And yet now the sea was as still as glass and the sun was hot on his hair. A sea breeze heavy with moisture and the scent of salt tickled his nose. The sudden change was almost more disturbing than nearly drowning had been; Jace couldn’t suppress the fear that all of what he was seeing was in his head—a dying dream, maybe?

            A shout from behind drew his attention, and he nearly lost his grip on the spar of wood. Another ship was sailing up behind him, a smaller, sleeker craft than Captain Vraska’s, with patched sails and a hull speckled with dark spots that were probably tar. Still, it was definitely large enough that if it ran into him, there was no question of him surviving. Jace opened his mouth, exhaustedly trying to shout, although he was pretty sure if he tried to wave his arms, he would promptly drown.

            He felt the wind change, losing its directionless lethargy in exchange for a stiff, almost storm-like howling. The small ship slewed roughly sideways, changing course almost effortlessly in a way Jace found almost unbelievable, and as it went it left a figure behind, hovering over the choppy water, his red-and-blue garments fluttering in the wind that swirled around him.

            Jace squinted against a sudden headache, and the scene before him flickered as if in a heat haze. Instead of the azure ocean, he saw the lines of a high, dark city rising in front of him, the same figure silhouetted on the horizon beneath a dozen flickering storm clouds. Blinking dazedly, he lost his grip momentarily on the spar of wood beneath him and was still struggling to regain it and spitting more seawater out of his mouth when someone landed beside him.

            “Jace, what in Tanit’s name are you doing on this backwater plane?” demanded the someone irritably.

            In confusion, Jace swallowed another mouthful of water and coughed wildly. “What?” he managed after a long moment during which his companion swore and slapped him on the back.

            “Let’s get you back onto the ship.” Clearing water from his eyes with the back of his hand, Jace got the first proper sight of his rescuer, a dark-haired man in a feathered hat. A heavy-looking metal contraption on his back connected to an equally heavy-looking metal gauntlet encasing his right hand and wrist. The device was spitting little sparks, and Jace was not sure he wanted to be near something like that while covered in salt water.

            “Um,” he said. “Do I know you?” he asked rather desperately.

            A bolt of lightning shot from the other man’s outstretched hand, barely missing Jace’s shoulder. “Oh, for _fuck’s_ sake, Jace! _Again?_ ”

            Jace took this to mean yes.

            “Come on.” Impatiently, the man in the feathered hat maneuvered himself around Jace to put his naked arm beneath Jace’s shoulder. Torn between anxiety about the unknown and really really wanting to get out of the ocean, Jace relaxed slightly and let him. It was, to be fair, somewhat unlikely that his situation could get much worse.

            The stranger’s hands slipped beneath his shoulder and his knees, lifting him in a bridal-style carry Jace hadn’t expected, and he squeaked in surprise as the wind rose suddenly around them, roaring into a gale and lifting both them and a large quantity of seawater skywards in a shaky column.

            “You’re just lucky I brought the backup,” the man said irritably as they floated towards the ship he had come from, wobbly on the column of rising air beneath them.

            “Backup?” Jace echoed slowly. The word sent another spark of pain shooting through his head, and the way he sank into the other man’s arms felt oddly familiar for an instant.

            A sigh. They landed on the deck of the ship with a jarring thump. “Can you stand?” asked his rescuer.

            Jace nodded, although when his feet hit the deck, he had a moment of not being certain his knees would support him, and he stumbled and half-fell against the other man. He expected an angry exclamation of some kind, maybe a shove, but instead, the man only sighed and put an arm around his waist. “I’d tell you to be more careful, but I think it’s way too late for that,” grumbled the man. “Come on, let’s get you down to the cabin.”

            “Zarek, you found him?” A dark woman also in a feathered hat, wearing a long coat and carrying a spyglass, was hurrying across the deck towards them. At a nod from Jace’s companion, she gave them both a tight smile. “Good. I’ve fulfilled our end of the bargain then.”

            “Yes, give me a few minutes to get him settled and I’ll sit down with your navigator and plot a course to wherever you want to go.”

            The woman nodded shortly, then gave him a smile. “I’m glad you found your lover, Zarek.”

            Jace choked, looking back and forth between the woman and the man named Zarek. _Lover_? Zarek sighed. “Yes, well,” he said. “Come on, Jace.”

            Still confused and a little daunted, Jace let himself be taken down a flight of stairs into the belly of the ship and into a small cabin tucked away at the end of a long, narrow corridor. It contained a single narrow bed at the far side; the rest of it was taken up with a pile of equipment of a style Jace had not observed over the last week and could not recall having observed at all, although, once again, something about it was tantalizingly familiar. Zarek nodded at it. “So…I brought the backup,” he said, shifting uneasily. Three little sparks appeared at his forehead and trickled down his nose.

            “You said that before.” Jace extricated himself from Zarek’s arms and moved towards the bed. He had to admit that it was a relief to sink down onto it. “What did you mean?”

            “Are you aware of your—” Zarek tapped the side of his forehead with one finger, and Jace stared at him in confusion.

            “What?” he asked.

            “Oh, great. That’s great. You’re a mind mage, Jace. One who has an _irritating_ habit of ‘accidentally’ erasing his own memories, so we made a backup copy last time you were on Ravnica to avoid exactly this kind of fallout.”

            “Ravnica?” A mind mage? For the past week, Jace had been swabbing the deck for Captain Vraska, who had told him that he was her manservant, who had been struck on the head during a storm. No one had suggested that he had any kind of magic, nor had Jace seen any evidence of such a thing.

            Zarek groaned. “Look, just—can you trust me? The device should still work, although I admit when we constructed it we assumed you’d at least be able to, um, cast your usual spells.”

            _Can you trust me_? Jace blinked and frowned. Everything was moving terribly quickly, but all the same he had to admit that it felt—well—more _right_ than the previous week had. Captain Vraska had not been particularly unkind—at least, she had not singled him out any more than the rest of the crew—but there had been a nagging sensation that all was not well, the emptiness at the back of his mind reaching up to claw at him. He’d woken six out of seven days in a cold sweat from shockingly realistic dreams of sand and hot wind, dreams that made no sense on the cold, salty ocean.

            Yet the thought of someone—probing at his mind—Jace swallowed hard and drew his knees into his chest, pulling his shoulders down into a frustrated huddle. “I don’t know,” he said, finally.

            A shudder of lightning illuminated the gauntlet, but Zarek’s face was carefully blank. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go find you something to eat. I need to have a meeting with the navigator anyway.”

            Jace watched him go mournfully and then curled up on the little bed and cursed the emptiness in his head.

~

            He must have fallen asleep, because he blinked his eyes and found that the room had darkened somewhat and was now lit partially by the light of a guttering candle and partly by a flickering electric lantern that sent a sudden, strange thrill through Jace. He could not recall having seen anything like it over the past week, but there was something strangely familiar about the scene.

            Zarek was bent over a net of wires that glittered faintly in the yellow light, fiddling with an oddly-shaped instrument. He had set his hat to the side, revealing a number of bleached white streaks in his hair, and there was a little furrow in his forehead, as if he was concentrating hard. As Jace watched, Zarek breathed out, sounding audibly angry. He moved the instrument, with a quick, practiced jerk of one wrist, and it emitted a high, whining noise. There was a sudden burst of sparks.

            “ _Fuck_.” Ral slammed the mizzium chronometer into the planks of the ship and put his head into his hands. Lightning ran like water down his back, vanishing into his gauntlet. “Fuck,” he mumbled again.

            “That’s an awfully delicate operation to be trying to do on a moving ship,” Jace told him. Ral looked up; the ship slewed sideways as Jace spoke.

            As if a shutter had closed, the sudden clarity vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving Jace only with a hollow, empty certainty that for a moment he had been all right; he had known who he was; he had known who the other man was, and everything had fitted together in a way that made sense.

            “Jace?” Zarek’s voice sounded hopeful. “I—uh—brought you some food, but you were asleep.”

            The sensation was infuriating. Jace knew that just a moment before he’d known both who he was and who Zarek was, and he’d been totally comfortable with the other man. More than comfortable, he thought. But now the feeling was gone, as if he’d been sitting in his home when someone had come in, dragged him out, and locked the door, so that he could only squint in through the window awkwardly and wish.

            He sighed. “I guess you can use the backup thing you were talking about,” he said.

            A flicker of—something—in his mind, like a fragment of a thought. As if he’d felt hopeful for a second, and it was suddenly replaced by anxiety.

            “All right,” Zarek said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Just stay on the bed.” He set down whatever he had been working on, got up, and went over to a box in the corner, out of which he fetched a slim silver ring. As he approached, Jace saw that a silvery net was attached in a complex pattern over the top of the ring. “You’ll have to put this on,” Zarek told him, and Jace, heart thumping unpleasantly, took the object from him and set it carefully on top of his head. “Okay. Um. Now I’m going to have to use some electricity,” Zarek told him. “Not enough to be dangerous by itself, and this has never had any bad effects before, but, uh, you always knew what you were doing before.”

            This close, Jace could see that Zarek’s hands were trembling, and that was oddly reassuring. If the other man was concerned, then he cared what happened to Jace. Jace took a deep breath, then nodded jerkily. “All right,” he said. “Go ahead, then.”

            Zarek put a hand on his cheek. Lightning sparked by Jace’s right eye.

            _—a dark city skyline underneath a flickering storm cloud, a vast tree rising towards sunlight breaking through the clouds, a flash of red-gold on the scales of a flying dragon—_

_—a messy laboratory, manalines flung carelessly all over the place, a chalkboard filled with scribblings, a chair in the center and sudden soft moans and sighs—_

_—a woman in cerulean armor raising an eyebrow at him as she poured him a steaming cup of coffee—_

_—a cold slab beneath his cheek, pain in his back, someone screaming in his ear—_

_—arms about him, a voice muttering awkward comfort in his ear—_

_—a rumbling, amused voice as someone’s hands folded his own into a fist with the thumb on the outside—_

_—“we need to talk about the damages that Chandra has caused”—_

More and more scraps and images flooded Jace’s mind, isolated at first, then with connections growing between them. It was like fitting a puzzle back together; difficult at first, then easier and easier as more and more pieces were slotted into place. Jace doubled over his knees, gasping and shuddering. Dimly, he heard someone’s voice calling his name, but he couldn’t shake himself out of the flood of information that he was buckling beneath.

            Then, quite suddenly, it was over. Jace’s back was drenched in sweat, and the memento crown he had built with Ral was chilly against his forehead. “Krokt,” he said weakly. At his side, Ral was practically vibrating with concern, and Jace reached out and squeezed his hand. “I’m all right,” he said quietly. “I think I am, anyway.”

            He blinked a few times. “What the hell happened?”

            “Fuck if I know! You ran off with Liliana—”

            “I did?”

            Ral’s hand was steady on his shoulder. “She said something about a walker named Tezzeret and you left me standing in the middle of a Rakdos club by myself without even an explanation right after _agreeing_ that you needed to spend more time _on plane_.”

            An involuntary shudder ran down Jace’s back. “T-Tezzeret?” he echoed.

            “Yeah. Got some stuff you need to tell me, Jace?”

            Jace leaned tiredly against him. “At this point, yes, I probably should, although I can’t tell you anything that happened between these—” he indicated the memento crown, “—and waking up on a ship with—oh _fuck_.”

            “What?”

            “ _Vraska’s_ here,” Jace said urgently. “I’ve been on board her ship for a week, and I have no idea what she’s doing, but she—” His stomach roiled, and he swallowed hard. “—she knows I’m here, too, I think she must’ve been pretty amused that I didn’t have any of my memories, because she told me I was one of her sailors.”

            “Fantastic!” Ral sighed. “And knowing you, you won’t come home until you know _exactly_ what she’s doing here.”

            Jace squirmed a little. “I’d kind of also like to know what Liliana was telling me about T-Tezzeret,” he muttered. “Although I suppose Ravnica would be the easiest place to go to ask her?”

            Ral shrugged noncommittally. Jace knew he wasn’t fond of Liliana, and he couldn’t really blame him. Jace himself found it difficult to be in her company; he always felt as if he was falling back into flirting with her, which made him feel guilty, but he wasn’t willing to tell Liliana about Ral for a number of reasons that he wasn’t entirely sure he understood himself, but that at this point it was becoming increasingly urgent that he figure out.

            “Well, you went off to some plane called Kaladesh, which admittedly good find, Jace, I can get some nice supplies there,” Ral told him nonchalantly. “And there was some kind of rebellion, because you people can never leave well enough alone, and then before I could actually get in contact with you, you and the damn Gatewatch hared off somewhere else again.”

            _Sand_ , Jace’s mind supplied. _Sand and heat and the sour taste of bile in the back of his throat_.

            “I didn’t stay there long,” Ral admitted. “Lavinia wanted me to get you back, but something about that plane gave me the creeps, so I left. I didn’t really expect you to be in this much trouble by the time I caught up with you. You idiot.” His hand tightened awkwardly around Jace’s shoulder.

            Jace, who had automatically begun to run through his own mind, trying to figure out what had happened, sighed and leaned against him. “I’m—sorry,” he said softly. “I don’t really know what happened, and I—know I haven’t been great about, um, talking to you and stuff.”

            “Damn straight,” Ral said. “Although I guess I haven’t always been that great about it either.”

            “Well, um.” Jace was searching for something he could say that would correctly convey the magnitude of his gratitude and—affection—when he ran into something in his mind that sent another uncontrollable shudder through him. “ _Shit_ ,” he hissed, a twinge running through his foot. “Oh, Krokt, oh _Krokt_.”

            “What’s wrong?”

            “Bolas,” Jace managed through numb lips. “Bolas has been in my head, this is—this is really, really not good.”

            “Who the hell is Bolas and can I kill him?”

            “Um,” said Jace. “Well, he’s a twenty-five-thousand-year-old dragon, and I would never willingly go near him again. I was lucky enough not to lose more than my toe the last time.”

            “So killing him might be tricky,” mused Ral. “Noted. This might require some careful preparation. Baal, I hate dragons.”

            Ral’s response drew an unexpected giggle out of Jace’s throat, and then he turned to the side and buried his face in Ral’s chest, trying not to cry. “Fuck,” he mumbled. “This is really bad, and I don’t even know what this _is_.”

            “Much as I hate not knowing what the fuck is going on, maybe getting some sleep would help?” Ral suggested. “I can, you know, leave you if you need me to.”

            “No—n-no, please don’t do that.” Jace breathed in the scent of oil and ozone, pressing closer to his lover. “Krokt, stay with me. Just—just stay with me. Please.”

            “Um, yeah. Sure. Of course.”

            “Whatever I did this time, I’m sorry,” Jace managed to get out. “Fuck, I am the worst boyfriend.”

            Ral scratched the back of his head. “You’re making it really hard for me to be angry at you,” he said quietly. “Look, yeah, you are a complete idiot, and you’ve been acting like an asshole, honestly, but it sounds like you got mixed up in some bad shit.”

            “You can be angry,” Jace sighed. “I’d be angry at me. I _am_ angry at me.” He took a deep breath. “There is a lot of stuff I need to tell you, that I should have told you a while ago.”

            “What are we?” Ral asked abruptly. “I’ve been following you around a lot, and I know we’ve fucked and stuff, but…”

            “Well, like I said, I’m not a _good_ boyfriend,” Jace said hopefully. “But I’d like to be a better one.”

            “Yeah, I guess, uh. Me, too?”

            Jace gave him a look. “You literally just tracked me down and shoved my memories back into my head,” he said. “That’s pretty high-tier boyfriending, I’d say.”

            Chuckling, Ral shoved him. “Yeah, well.”

            Letting the shove propel him backwards, Jace reached up and dragged Ral down on top of him, and their lips met. “Krokt, you are a much better boyfriend than I deserve,” Jace murmured as Ral groaned and kissed him down the side of his neck. “Hold me, and I’ll give you as much of an explanation as I have, anyway.”

            “ _Just_ hold you?” Ral grinned at him.

            “W-Well—don’t do anything that makes it impossible for me to _talk_ ,” Jace amended.

            “Oh, so leave your mouth alone. Got it, Jace.” His hand slid beneath Jace’s shirt and across his stomach. “I’ll be very careful,” Ral breathed in his ear.

            “This is sending some mixed signals,” Jace complained, but the warmth of Ral’s hand on him was almost pathetically comforting. And he knew that he needed someone other than Liliana to know about his past. Otherwise, she would always, always have that power over him. Jace shuddered into Ral’s touch and opened his mouth to speak.

           


End file.
